Since Sebald’s death in 2001 his influence has only grown, especially outside of Germany—rather, especially in countries that fought Germany, and remained fascinated by its madness. To be sure, it’s Sebald’s techniques that are thriving—his pondering of a set of facts in situ, as a means of interpreting himself—while his preoccupation with the Holocaust has been transposed to more-current crises. It helps, on a first reading of Sebald, to have already read your Benjamin, and Adorno, Wittgenstein, and Freud. But it doesn’t help, on a first reading of Sebald’s heirs—say Geoff Dyer, Teju Cole, and Ben Lerner—to have already read your Sebald. Their books come off as too weak to shoulder the comparison, as the writer-narrators—who share traits if not also names with their authors—practice backpacker-flânerie through the major capitals in the style not of exile but of tourism or study-abroad. Certainly Dyer’s Jeff (in Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi), Cole’s Julius (in Open City), and Lerner’s Adam (in Leaving the Atocha Station) and Ben (in 10:04) are still doing the most serious work of trying to patch a creative self out of the strangers they meet and the artworks they experience, and the way they go about it is often intelligent (Lerner), compassionate (Cole), and droll (Dyer). Still, all of those books of self-alienation through travel are suffused with the shaming suspicion that a ticket home will always be available—even if that’s only because everywhere in the world can feel like “home,” or much of it has been homogenized to resemble it, at least. But globalization isn’t the novelist’s fault, or not completely.